Steelworks Crafts Breathtakingly Beautiful CG Film For NYC Ballet

CGI and animation specialist studio Steelworks has released a gorgeous CG film for NYC Ballet, promoting its production of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’.

Following the central motif of a delicate pink rose, the film is a visual delight, featuring stunning fabric and particle simulations, floating gold dust, flowing floral elements, and fluttering silk-like butterfly wings. Just like ballet dancers, each piece of the medley moves in perfect harmony with the ethereal score, luring viewers into a captivating new world.

To craft the beautiful film, Steelworks was tasked with briefly and abstractly interpreting a selection of key scenes from ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, inspired by its exquisite scenery and costume design. With only 30 seconds to work with, the team proposed a full CGI piece utilising motifs from the ballet to capture the emotion as well as the main storytelling points.

Steelworks drew aesthetic inspiration from the ballet’s lush stage design, curating a colour palette of warm pinks, lilacs, yellows, and orange-golds. In particular, the team wanted to reflect two of the production’s most iconic floral sequences: the ‘Rose Adagio’ and the ‘Garland Dance’. The former sees each of Princess Aurora’s suitors approach her with a rose and perform a dance, while the latter is set to some of the ballet’s most identifiable music, and features garland motifs and kaleidoscopic patterns - an influence clearly visible in Steelworks’ film.

Ensuring a seamless medley of elements, Steelworks and the client developed animatic motion reviews until they were approved at medium resolution, before sending this to a composer to prepare a bespoke matching score. Meanwhile, Steelworks rendered out the final resolution delivery, and merged the visuals with the sound design once it was ready. The end result is a faultless blend of animation, colour, motion, and sound, evoking a visceral emotional response in the viewer.

Chago Venable, Executive Producer at Steelworks, comments: “The whole experience of crafting this film went incredibly well. With such an emotionally driven piece, there’s always the inevitable expectation of multiple discovery and feedback rounds to get it “just right”, as it’s so subjective. This, however, was one of those delightful projects where the creative process runs really smoothly, and we were aligned right from the start. It was a pleasure to work with NYC Ballet.”

He adds: “Our hope is that this really inspired people to go and see the live performance. It’s wonderful to work on an animation which celebrates and promotes art, allowing us to make something so beautiful and artistic without the confines of a specific product.”